Actions and Functions

Although a pure REST service would perform operations through manipulating the state of resources, we have found that many services require the ability to encapsulate complex processing logic into atomic operations.

Rather than requiring services to expose a separate endpoint for such business logic, RAPID allows services to support Operations.

Operations are exposed as resources at the root of the service or "bound" to the resource on which they operate.

Operations bound to a resource are invoked by appending a segment containing the name of the operation to the URL of the resource.

The name of the operation must not conflict with the name of any properties or other operations bound to that resource.

Operations include Actions and Functions.

Actions

Actions have effects on resources, are invoked using POST, and have parameters specified in the body.

Template	POST {resource-path}/{actionName}
Example	POST http://rapid-pro.org/company/employees/1/youreFired

Body:

{
  "reason": "Embezzlement"
}

Functions

Functions are invoked using GET and must have no side effects. Parameters are passed to functions as query options.

Template	GET {resource-path}/{functionName}?{@param=value...}
Example	GET http://rapid-pro.org/company/topEmployees?@num=2